General Game Speed And Recording Advice

So somebody on Reddit was asking about how to get smooth gameplay speed on Mabi after seeing a nice 60FPS video, so here's a recreation of my advice from there.

- Basic advice to start since Mabinogi is an old game.

Shut down everything that's not Mabinogi. I don't care if it's just your browser, modern browsers use the GPU by default too. Mabi doesn't like sharing.

Play fullscreen. That example recording was 1080p so unless the user was on a 4K screen or something they were fullscreen. Mabi *is* actually the type of old-ass game that gets a benefit from exclusive fullscreen.

Make sure you have the latest display drivers, actually check on the website of the company that made your chipset (AMD/Nvidia). Don't rely on the Windows driver search (that only gets mainline WHQL/signed things) and don't rely on third-party programs (the website of the company that made the hardware in your card knows more).

- Mabi-specific advice...

Lower the render/view distance in Mabi. The slider is actually for an amount between the min and max for a zone (and it differs by zone), so halfway on the slider in Iria is different than halfway on the slider in Dunbarton, for example.

Close your inventory and other UI windows. Mabinogi's UI is a bunch of 3D models, if you have a bunch of inventory bags open that are full of items, it can noticeably slow down the game! I wish I was kidding. Here's the game rendering a normal scene. Now here's the game rendering a big-ass inventory. With that inventory open, it takes about 15% more time to render a frame than with it closed.

For recordings, recording method matters as well, and there's multiple types of programs with different capabilities.

If you're just interested in quickly recording for upload/display (and the video will not be going through something like Vegas before hitting the net and does not have to be perfect quality), you can use Shadowplay from Nvidia, or the game DVR built into Windows 10. These both produce smooth recordings and work similarly (H264), though Shadowplay only works properly in fullscreen and the Windows 10 DVR seems to only work properly windowed for Mabi. These also produce smaller recordings as well since they're already encoded into a lossy format.

If you absolutely need the highest-quality raw recordings, use something like FRAPS. This is, nowadays, slower than newer recording softwares that use GPU acceleration (Shadowplay/DVR/etc.), but it produces great video quality (at the cost of Xbox-huge filesizes). You'd use this if you want to examine the recording frame-by-frame and pixel-by-pixel for things, and the raw recordings are great for taking into other programs (like a nonlinear video editor which would need to encode at the end, or GifCam for making gifs or something).

If neither of the above are an option (AMD card on non-Win10 and want to be free), Open Broadcaster Software needs more setup (especially where quality is concerned), but can produce nice-quality videos that are already compressed and ready for upload.

Here's a quick example video made with the above advice, using Shadowplay, to show constant 60FPS.

If you're on Intel integrated graphics, just kinda' curl up in a fetal position and cry.

I recommend dxtory as a fraps-like software. It's pretty much fraps but more modern. Record in lossless or pseudo-lossless formats and then encode them yourself for best results, but it can output h264 if you need it to. If you're uploading to youtube there's specific recommendations that you might not be able to get with directly outputing the final video you want to upload.

It's also a good idea to have a pretty good, dedicated hard drive as a recording destination, especially if you're outputting lossless 60 frames per second at 1080p.

If you're on Intel integrated graphics, just kinda' curl up in a fetal position and cry.

QFT

I'm beating a dead horse at this point, but it's absolutely retarded how a game over 10 years old runs this slow. I mean, even for me and my potato computer, I can run Guild Wars 2 with good frames.

EDIT: Oh, here's a protip with those who actually do have a potato as a computer: Hide those quest info. Even if it's a few markers on your screen, it seems that it makes you lag like a mother. Use it for G20 or something, but immediately turn it off after you finish it. Seriously.

Haven't played with dxtory much myself, since Windows 10 has recording and OBS has gotten updates and junk I've been using FRAPS just for lossless stuff or testing/examination. And yes, quest markers, totally forgot about that.